You can use this Code of Conduct, or bits of it, as long as you follow the rules of the CC BY 4.0 license. A license is a document that tells you what you can and can't do with someone else's work. Click here for a non-plain language version.
The people that work on Winnie_Bot live all over the world. We have worked on a lot of computer code before we started making Winnie, and we spend a lot of time working on the bot because many people get good things from using her. Many of us are part of groups that have been treated badly in the past, or have had things happen to us that were traumatic. Because of this, it's important for us to have a code of conduct that everyone can understand, and make sure that everyone is following it. A code of conduct is a set of rules that people need to follow to work on the project. That way, everyone will feel good about working on Winnie, and nobody will be hurt because they worked on the project.
We don't want to stop people from talking about things - we want everyone to be able to talk without having to worry. What we don't want is for people's beliefs and experiences to be a reason for people working on Winnie to start fights with each other. We all want Winnie to be the Best Bot Ever:tm:, so we have some ground rules for anyone who wants to help us with her.
We want everyone who works on Winnie to do these things:
- Don't be a dick. We talk mostly over text, and we may not all know each other that well. This means that we may not always know when people are being sarcastic or venting. We should be friendly when we talk to each other, and respect each others' boundaries. We should also try not to one-up each other, be negative, or ask personal questions about things that people don't want to talk about. If we're all professional, then we're more likely to have happy and productive relationships!
- Avoid contentious topics within the team space. We don't want people to feel like they need to lie about their identity, beliefs, or opinions - it's okay for people to say these things. However, we know that in a diverse group of people, it's easy for us to fight about our experiences. Because of this, if you want to talk in-depth about topics that people often argue about (politics, race, sex, gender, religion, psychology, etc.) we want you to do it in private messages, instead of team channels.
- Respect the personhood of others. People are who they say they are, and we should talk about them the way that they want us to. We all have lots of things, both good and bad, that happen during our lives. It's important to be kind to people who are having a bad time, or have had traumatic things happen. For example, if a person says "I need a day off because I saw my ex and now I'm stressed," accept that statement at face value. Don't give them advice if they haven't asked for it, and don't ask lots of questions about their life history.
- Front-channel everything. We should talk about everything that's going on in Discord channels, not in private. We like it when information is easy to find, and it's good for the project when we talk about everything, even hard things, where other people can see it. Even if something seems small, we still want you to post it where everyone can see it, because they might want to know about it. If more people look at things, we're not going to make as many mistakes.
- Observe the
Winnie_BotCode of Conduct while testing or coding the product. Don't use bad language in the code or in any bits of Winnie that other people can see, unless someone working on the project has asked you to do it so that they can test something. We want any language that everyone can see to be appropriate for people no matter how old they are of what experiences they've had.
The Winnie_Bot team works mostly over text, and we don't always work at the same time. This means that sometimes things will go wrong. If you think you've seen someone do something that doesn't follow these rules, then you should talk to a member of the core team about it. The core team are the people who keep the project running. It's better if you don't try to fix these problems on your own, unless you're the person who that thing is being done to. If so, you can approach them if you want, or ask someone on the core team to help you with the situation. It's better to let people know so that we can try to fix the problems, rather than keeping things quiet until people are very upset with each other, and it's harder to fix the problems so that everyone is happy.
If someone does something that's against these rules, the person who's running the bit of the project that they're working on will talk to them about how to solve the problem. When we've seen these situations before, a friendly private chat has usually been enough to come up with a good solution.
If someone continues to behave badly after that, though, then they won't be allowed to keep working on Winnie. Because we want everyone to know about how we run the project, we'll tell people working on it what we've decided and why we made that decision.